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A Bad Impression Outlasts a Bridge’s New Paint

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThe Hell Gate Bridge, which connects Queens with the Bronx, is in sorry need of a paint job.

The Hell Gate Bridge looks like hell.

“It should be the jewel of New York City, but instead it’s turned into eight shades of lavender,” said Peter F. Vallone Jr., a city councilman through whose district in Astoria the railroad bridge cuts before it spans a section of the East River known as Hell Gate, across to Wards Island and Randalls Island, linking Queens to the Bronx.

The bridge needs a paint job, which might not be so complicated if the bridge were owned by the city or the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Most bridges in the city have budgets for repainting. But the Hell Gate — which may be the least known of the East River bridges — has a complicated history when it comes to its paint job.

The three-and-a-half-mile steel span is owned by Amtrak and is a crucial link along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line between Washington and Boston. It carries both Amtrak’s passenger trains and some freight trains.

After the bridge opened in 1916, the original coating lasted 60 years, largely because it was done with lead-based paint, which later became forbidden to use because of health risks.

But by the 1980s, the bridge became a crumbling symbol of urban decay.

In 1991 Congress set aside $55 million for repairing and repainting the bridge, after no small petitioning by Mr. Vallone’s father, Peter F. Vallone Sr., who was his predecessor in the Council seat and was at the time the Council speaker.

Instead of more conventional bridge paint colors, which tend to be gray or muted, the paint selected for the project was a custom-blended color called Hell Gate Red.

“It was a radical departure, but Amtrak wanted the bridge red,” said Greg Campbell, whose family started George Campbell Painting in Flushing, which was selected to paint parts of the bridge as part of a roughly $8 million contract with Amtrak. The company, Mr. Campbell said, was started by his grandfather in 1930 and has painted nearly every large bridge in New York City.

The paint for the Hell Gate Bridge was more expensive than other available choices, Mr. Campbell said.

It required a four-coat application process developed by Valspar, a large paint company, and consisted of two coats of epoxy primer, a red urethane finish and then a clear finish, all designed to protect the surface from corrosion, ultraviolet rays and salt from the river water below, Mr. Campbell said.

But the bridge’s finish began to fade and discolor even before the work was completed, Mr. Campbell said, because Valspar “changed the formulation” of the paint to a “pigment that didn’t hold its color.” The fading paint posed a cosmetic problem, he said, but did not undermine the protection it provided.

Todd Heisler/The New York TimesPaint applied to the Hell Gate Bridge in the 1990s began to fade before all of the work was done.

“There was nothing wrong with the paint job,” Mr. Campbell said. “The truth is that the paint color faded. The paint manufacturer was the cause of the problem.”

Amtrak agreed to release the balance of its payment to Campbell only if the company repainted the faded areas. Amtrak insisted on the same Valspar paint, Mr. Campbell said, on the disputed notion that perhaps the paint had been wrongly applied. So in 1996, Campbell repainted a section of the bridge over the river, but it faded again almost immediately.

Campbell sued Valspar, and before a trial, Valspar officials admitted to changing companies for the pigment used in the mixing of the paint, Mr. Campbell said. He said the suit ended in a settlement in which Valspar paid Campbell for damages. He would not divulge the amount.

A spokesman for Valspar, John Anton, did not respond to questions about the project. Cliff Cole, an Amtrak spokesman, would say only that the current paint posed no safety problems and that the railroad had no immediate plans to repaint the bridge.

When it opened, the Hell Gate Bridge was an engineering marvel, the longest steel-arch bridge in the world. It became the inspiration for the famous Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia.

Mr. Vallone said he had asked Amtrak repeatedly to repaint the Hell Gate Bridge — and gotten New York’s senators in Washington to do the same over the past decade – but to no avail.

“We’re not talking about a backyard deck. We’re talking about one of the most beautiful bridges in the world,” Mr. Vallone said. “The federal government needs to make them do it and they have not.”

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